2014 Banff, Canada

Auto/biography in Transit

Sponsored by the University of Alberta, York University, the University of Waterloo, and the University of British Columbia

May 29-June 1, 2014

Want to know more? Download the final conference programme at the bottom of the page.

The IABA 2014 Team

from left, Linda Warley, Julie Rak, Laurie McNeill, Eva Karpinski

REPORT

Conference for
the International Association for Biography and Autobiography (IABA)

Auto/biography
in Transit

May 29-June 1,
2014

Banff Centre,
Alberta, Canada

Autobiography in
Transit – and theory on the front line. How IABA 2014 is sounding out new depths
in life writing scholarship

by Seraphima
Kennedy, Goldsmiths, UK

‘I’m
going to let you finish,’ wrote one IABA 2014 delegate on Twitter, ‘but
#IABA2014 literally has the best people of all time.’ I could write another
piece about the high quality of the papers presented, the cutting edge
explorations in the field, the barnstorming presentations and top-of the-Richter-scale
scholarship served up over the course of three days at the Banff Centre for the
Arts from 29 May – 1 June 2014. Or I could write about the staggering mountains,
elk, deer, the excellent experience created by the Banff Conference Team, the
amazing facilities (including pool, jacuzzi, queen-sized beds), the jaw-droppingly-delicious
three course meals. Most of it would sound like an exaggeration and none of it
would do justice to the actual experience, or do much to evoke the dynamism and
friendliness of the scholars present.What I can say is that IABA 2014 is likely to go down in
auto/biographical scholarship history not only as the place with the best view,
best banquet and best wildlife, but also as THAT conference where THAT theory
was first propounded. ‘IABA has ruined me for future conferences,’ wrote one of
the delegates in an email a week after the event. She was not just talking
about the buffet.

What
made this different from other conferences? The welcome of the organizing
committee for one, headed up by the wonderful Julie Rak, Laurie McNeill, Eva
Karpinski and Linda Warley. The approachability of eminent scholars and the absence
of academic hierarchies, coupled with a focus on improving skills for new
scholars and graduate students through a dedicated workshop for new scholars
run by some of the biggest brains in life writing scholarship. The awareness
that life stories are valuable, subtle areas for dynamic research into theory
and practice. This was reflected in the choice of readers and keynote speakers:
Carolyn Miller, Rocio Davis, Fred Wah, and poets Sharron Proulx-Turner and
Patrick Lane.

The
opening words from Elder Tom Crane Bear, Caretaker of the Land and a member of
the Siksika Nation, highlighted that we were here to investigate a particular form
of creative scholarship: ‘We came up through the southwest where the
chokecherries grow,’ he said, speaking about the history of his people the
Blackfoots. What may have been a consciously novelistic turn of phrase felt
like an acknowledgment that in Canada, and in particular on the land on which we
were standing, one narrative was always laid crossways over another. How and
why we pay attention to those narratives, and how we can respond to the stories
of others were the questions on the minds of assembled scholars.

Yet
this was a conference as much about looking forward as back. There were panels
on Theorizing Human Rights, Representing Islam, Digital Futures, Nineteenth-Century
Women’s Narratives, Neoliberal Stories, and Comics and Justice, among many
others.In her keynote address ‘Memoir,
Blog, and Selfie: Genre as Social Action in Autobiographical Representations,’
Carolyn Miller treated the audience to a history of the self-referential
portrait, linking genre expectations, social structures and Lejeune’s
‘autobiographical pact’ with James Frey, Oprah, and the ‘fifteen types of
selfie.’ Could selfies be seen as a form of life writing? A lively debate set
the tone for a stimulating and at times controversial conference, while the
Twitter-sphere saw the emergence of a new kind of selfie – the IABA 2014
selfie. This proved a popular genre among assembled scholars, and provided much
entertainment over the course of the conference (look for #iabaselfie2014 on
Twitter, or scroll through #iaba2014 to see some of the best of these).

IABA
2014 was marked by a burgeoning interaction with technology. For the first time,
a committed cohort of bloggers (codename: ‘Tweetbots’) took over the
Twittersphere,blogging to interested
followers in the UK, US, Canada and Australia, with some scholars following the
conversations for many hours and contributing questions direct to panel discussions.
This created an intriguing, private-yet-public meta-IABA, with information
being shared across panel sessions in a virtual web of intercultural reference.

The
use of technology allowed us to chart simultaneous currents in auto/biographical
theory and practice, but it wasn’t only in cyberspace that scholars were
throwing out new lines of enquiry. There was a growing awareness of new
auto/biographical writing outlets produced by new media, visual cultures,
memes, blogspots, video and data-driven forms of life writing analysis.Meg Jensen (University of Kingston) discussed
the complexity of human rights work in semi-autobiographical texts, closing a
discussion of paraeidolic life writing with a discussion of meme. Anna Poletti opened up new ground by querying the role of
the life writing text in zines about suicide. Over in ‘Self-Branding,’
questions of gender and agency came to the fore as K.J. Lee explored memoirs by
Canadian women writers, Emma Maguire looked at the video blogs of Jenna
Marbles, while the use of science, cognitive sciences and memory also
pointed the way to Liz Rodrigues’ paper on ‘Life Writing as a data driven
form.’

Testimony
remained a complex and potentially dangerous business: speaking for others or
attempting to bestow rights through articulation was as fraught as ever. Cynthia
Franklin (University of Hawai’i Manoa) problematized Dave Eggers’ use of the
story of Zeitoun, and queried whether
Eggers’ narrativisation underscores rather than challenges the stereotypes it
seeks to disturb. Terri Tomsky (University of Alberta) presented a fascinating
investigation into memoirs of lawyers representing Guantanamo Bay inmates. Her
rich analysis complicated the ways in which legal narratives unpick the ‘us vs.
them’ dyad, yet somehow still legitimate ‘us’ as beholders of rights that can
be bestowed on others.Janice Williamson
(University of Alberta) continued the theme of justice, habeas corpus and the
law in ‘Life Story Versus Law story: Omar Khadr’s Imprisonment 2002-14,’
concluding with a discussion on proxy narratives in life writing and life
writing structures that both help and hinder academic inquiry into real life
narratives.As our resident poet Sharron
Proulx-Turner put it, 'The way to meet cultures is
to witness the culture rather than manipulate for a western 'I'.

What
life writing scholarship means in the field, and how scholars engage with both texts
and subjects, was a key area of concern.Laurie McNeill gave a valuable critique of one university’s pedagogy of decolonization in
relation to Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Committee, asking whether we
could encourage an ethical awareness for students to productively engage with
these issues. How can instructors create awareness without allowing testimonies
to be simply consumed? This was a practical, as well as an ethical concern. In
the panel on ‘Liminal Memory,’ Sidonie Smith, Janice Hladki and Bina Freiwald
all used autobiography and visual biography to explore notions of shadows and
border-crossing, as well as desolation and betrayal in the lives of their
subjects. Smith’s account of the “State of Exception Exhibit,” became a text written
on the bodies of those involved with it through the use of tattooage. Bina
Freidl’s work on Jewish Women’s writing demonstrated how stories of collective
identities could subsume individual identities. In her presentation on Kent
Monkmann’s video art, Janice Hladki raised important questions about memory and
affect, with Monkmann’s video interrogating the
ways that countermemorial artworks can reclaim/recast dominant narratives of
nation-state celebrations of white settler histories.

A
significant focus of the conference was on interdisciplinary work, with several
scholars calling for new methodologies of reading, looking outside of the arts
and humanities and using new methods to place the body within the text. Great
emphasis was placed on multimodal life writing narratives – on comics, digital
objects, the visual and the sonic. There was more internationalization and
intercultural exchange, mobility and transit of texts and scholars. Leigh Gilmore’s paper ‘Getting a Handle on Pain’ crystallised
a repeated scholarly preoccupation with ethical methodologies of reading.
Looking over her shoulder at Sontag, Gilmore complicated verbal-visual interactions
in the graphic novel. What meaning takes place in a text and where? How do verbal and visual texts
instruct us in interpreting pain? What does paratextual imagery in memoirs of
illness actually do? Questioning the
use of metonymy to invite the reader to identify with the source of pain, Gilmore
ended with a call to look at the methodologies and critical tools we use in our
encounters with auto/biographical texts.

This deconstruction of the verbal-visual matrix echoed Miller’s
injunction to scholars to think visibly (vis à vis the selfie), while pointing
forward towards Julia Watson and Candida Rifkind’s separate papers in Comics
and Justice. Candida
Rifkind’s paper on ‘Graphic Biography and the
Half-Lives of Robert Oppenheimer’ encapsulated some of the key themes
that we were beginning to see develop. Rifkind
argued that ‘atomic graphic biographies’ open up new ways of seeing a familiar
scientific context with their triangulation of instability. Julia Watson -
always at the cutting edge of method – asked us to think about how we read and how
we are engaged by texts. Creating a taxonomy of the first person in comics,
Watson reinterpreted narrative tropes in Parsua Bashi's Nylon Road, arguing that the auto/biographical act becomes an
occasion for evaluating who the narrator is across national borders. Watson
went on to consider the opportunities provided by multimodal A/B acts.
What are the affordances of comics for holding
disparate moments in productive tension?

This sense of tension holding together ideas and selves – of the
text as an arena in which things simultaneously do and do not fall apart –was echoed in John Zuern’s paper on US
memoirs written after the economic crash of 2008. Pinning down the idea of
post-crash memoirs as transitory texts, Zuern highlighted the transits of the
memoirist’s self into pre-written narrative modes, and argued that austerity
had led to a ‘precarization of the self’ in which the centre does not hold. In
Emily Hipchen’s paper on the construction of Steve Jobs in Walter Isaacson’s
memoir of the same name, Hipchen commented productively on the ways in which
Jobs’ life is narrated in orbit by his status as hyper-capable human,
traumatised adoptee, and ‘supercrip.’ There was a lightbulb moment in the
discussion between Hipchen and Craig Howes in the discussion when the relevance
to the Superman story was noted. This was the kind of electricity that the best
intellectual discussions are made of.

Banff emerged as a sparkling venue for a conference of this
size, not only because of the spectacular scenery and great food. The centre is
uniquely committed to the promotion of artistic endeavor in Canada. As well as
a fully stocked library open to hungry delegates, the centre’s programme of
residencies for emerging artists meant that quiet drink in the bar could be
spiced up by a percussion performance, jazz guitar or saxophone solo, while the
live music venues at the centre provided a space for delegates to swing their
theoretical cares away.

By the
halfway point most delegates had encountered tranquil species of deer in the
surrounding grounds, eaten delightful meals looking out over the mountains, and
even seen bears in the national park. We watched a male elk swim from one side
of the river to another, at the same time as new areas were opening up in the
field.

This open
ground was marked by a shift from interpretation to action. ‘Less about
"me" and more about "you,"’ as Linda Warley put it. Much
new work was pulling biography – and in particular biographies of the self as
other – into new territory. Several scholars referenced field work in the
production of autobiographical texts and their consumption, while still others
focused on new media narratives, visual autobiography, the use of objects and
three-dimensional representations of both individual and collective lives
lived.

Rocio Davis provided the final keynote of the conference,
‘Fictional Transits: Is there an Autobiography in this Text?’ Attending to Ruth
Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being, Davis looked at the transits between ‘fiction’
and ‘non-fiction,’ arguing that Ozeki’s signaling of creative processes
illuminates a slippage which moves the reader to become the ‘you’ in the text.
‘I am writing this and wondering about you somewhere in my future,' the
narrator says at the beginning. Davis argued that Ozeki complicates our
relationship with the story and with the fictive and referential universe
through layering, platforms, performativity, and acts of storytelling. As one
blogger put it, ‘traditional genre boundaries seem inadequate when reading
texts like this one.’

A
highlight of the weekend was the Life Readings Series. Sharron Proulx-Turner
was generously sponsored by the journal a/b:
auto/biography studies and Patrick
Lane appeared courtesy of the Writer’s Union. The series brought two of the
finest voices in Canadian literature into the conference fold. The first day of the conference ended with a
drinks reception in the stunning Tom Crane Bear Hall of the Max Bell Building,
with views of the sun setting over the glorious Rocky Mountains. Métis poet
Sharron Proulx-Turner read from a series of poems including ‘A Houseful of
Birds,’ before talking about sealed records and the legacy of Canada’s
Residential School system. 'There was another story there,’ she read, ‘where a
girl opened her mouth and inside was the universe.' Sharron was a compelling
speaker about the impact of trauma on her own writing, her methods of using
autobiographical material, and a compassionate and singular presence throughout
the rest of the conference.

Patrick
Lane was just as frank with his discussion of the uses of autobiography, the
writing process, fear of failure and his decision to start writing. Hinting at
a combination of memory, experience and affect, writing for Lane was bound up
with affect: ‘I can still feel those dark mountains, they rose like morning
clothes from Kootenay lake.' Somehow the act of writing coexisted with the fear
of erasure, an awareness of not being fully represented: ‘'Canada did not
exist, and neither did I. I wanted to exist,’ he said.These were powerful, intimate readings,
highlighting some of the faultlines inherent in the theorization of writing
about the self that would be plotted over the next two days. And, as Lane
acknowledged, this was why we were there. ‘You guys are the academics,’ he said.
‘I’m just a writer.’

The
multimodal nature of much scholarly criticism was perhaps summed up by the
second keynote address from Canadian poet Fred Wah. Wah remains at the
forefront of Canadian literature in the post-postmodern era, citing Robert
Creeley and Robert Duncan as influences. He purposefully broke with academic
tradition, interweaving extracts from his critically-acclaimed book of poetry, Diamond Grill, with an outline of his
thoughts on the constitutive indeterminacy of the ‘biotext.’ Wah discussed the
limits of representing identity through a text, talking about his own
experience of growing up ‘Chinese-American’ in Canada: how he existed in the
blank space after racial origin forms, ‘living in the hyphen’ between two
identities. This in-betweenness features repeatedly in his work –the swinging door of his father’s Chinese
restaurant in Waiting for Saskatchewan ‘continues
to operate in my thinking about hybridity.’

Perhaps the life writing text – looking forward as well as back
– always embodies Wah’s swinging kitchen door, a then as well as a here and
now, a transit between one way of being and another. What came out of IABA 2014 was a call for a new set of tools to
talk about selves and identities in constant movement, at risk of being drowned
out, forgotten or erased. Transits, orbits, hyphens, poetry,
animals, ethics, theory on the front line – IABA 2014 reaffirmed the status of
auto/biographical theory and practice as the preeminent mode of scholarship for
our time. As Rocio Davis put it in her keynote, quoting Ruth Ozeki: ‘Life is
full of stories – or maybe life is only stories.’

Want to know more? Download the Call for Papers and the Programme below.